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Cantatrix sopranica L : Et autres écrits scientifiques
Parodie, pastiche, charge, caricature ? Laissons au lecteur le soin de caractériser d'un nom chacun des textes ici rassemblés, et qui révèlent une figure parfois ignorée de Perec, celle du savant.
Mass Market Paperback
First published January 1, 1991
About the author
Georges Perec
145 books1,727 followersGeorges Perec was a highly-regarded French novelist, filmmaker, and essayist. He was a member of the Oulipo group. Many of his novels and essays abound with experimental wordplay, lists, and attempts at classification, and they are usually tinged with melancholy.
Born in a working-class district of Paris, Perec was the only son of Icek Judko and Cyrla (Schulewicz) Peretz, Polish Jews who had emigrated to France in the 1920s. He was a distant relative of the Yiddish writer Isaac Leib Peretz.
Perec's first novel, Les Choses (Things: A Story of the Sixties) was awarded the Prix Renaudot in 1965.
In 1978, Perec won the prix Médicis for Life: A User's Manual (French title, La Vie mode d'emploi), possibly his best-known work. The 99 chapters of this 600 page piece move like a knight's tour of a chessboard around the room plan of a Paris apartment building, describing the rooms and stairwell and telling the stories of the inhabitants.
Cantatrix Sopranica L. is a spoof scientific paper detailing experiments on the "yelling reaction" provoked in sopranos by pelting them with rotten tomatoes. All the references in the paper are multi-lingual puns and jokes, e.g. "(Karybb et Scyla, 1973)".
Perec is also noted for his constrained writing: his 300-page novel La disparition (1969) is a lipogram, written without ever using the letter "e". It has been translated into English by Gilbert Adair under the title A Void (1994). The silent disappearance of the letter might be considered a metaphor for the Jewish experience during the Second World War. Since the name 'Georges Perec' is full of 'e's, the disappearance of the letter also ensures the author's own 'disappearance'.
His novella Les revenentes (1972) is a complementary univocalic piece in which the letter "e" is the only vowel used. This constraint affects even the title, which would conventionally be spelt Revenantes. An English translation by Ian Monk was published in 1996 as The Exeter Text: Jewels, Secrets, Sex in the collection Three.
It has been remarked by Jacques Roubaud that these two novels draw words from two disjoint sets of the French language, and that a third novel would be possible, made from the words not used so far (those containing both "e" and a vowel other than "e").
W ou le souvenir d'enfance, (W, or, the Memory of Childhood, 1975) is a semi-autobiographical work which is hard to classify. Two alternating narratives make up the volume: one, a fictional outline of a totalitarian island country called "W", patterned partly on life in a concentration camp; and the second, descriptions of childhood. Both merge towards the end when the common theme of the Holocaust is explained.
Perec was a heavy smoker throughout his life, and was diagnosed with lung cancer in 1981. He died the following year in Ivry-sur-Seine at only forty-five-years old. His ashes are held at the columbarium of the Père Lachaise Cemetery.
David Bellos wrote an extensive biography of Perec: Georges Perec: A Life in Words, which won the Académie Goncourt's bourse for biography in 1994.
Born in a working-class district of Paris, Perec was the only son of Icek Judko and Cyrla (Schulewicz) Peretz, Polish Jews who had emigrated to France in the 1920s. He was a distant relative of the Yiddish writer Isaac Leib Peretz.
Perec's first novel, Les Choses (Things: A Story of the Sixties) was awarded the Prix Renaudot in 1965.
In 1978, Perec won the prix Médicis for Life: A User's Manual (French title, La Vie mode d'emploi), possibly his best-known work. The 99 chapters of this 600 page piece move like a knight's tour of a chessboard around the room plan of a Paris apartment building, describing the rooms and stairwell and telling the stories of the inhabitants.
Cantatrix Sopranica L. is a spoof scientific paper detailing experiments on the "yelling reaction" provoked in sopranos by pelting them with rotten tomatoes. All the references in the paper are multi-lingual puns and jokes, e.g. "(Karybb et Scyla, 1973)".
Perec is also noted for his constrained writing: his 300-page novel La disparition (1969) is a lipogram, written without ever using the letter "e". It has been translated into English by Gilbert Adair under the title A Void (1994). The silent disappearance of the letter might be considered a metaphor for the Jewish experience during the Second World War. Since the name 'Georges Perec' is full of 'e's, the disappearance of the letter also ensures the author's own 'disappearance'.
His novella Les revenentes (1972) is a complementary univocalic piece in which the letter "e" is the only vowel used. This constraint affects even the title, which would conventionally be spelt Revenantes. An English translation by Ian Monk was published in 1996 as The Exeter Text: Jewels, Secrets, Sex in the collection Three.
It has been remarked by Jacques Roubaud that these two novels draw words from two disjoint sets of the French language, and that a third novel would be possible, made from the words not used so far (those containing both "e" and a vowel other than "e").
W ou le souvenir d'enfance, (W, or, the Memory of Childhood, 1975) is a semi-autobiographical work which is hard to classify. Two alternating narratives make up the volume: one, a fictional outline of a totalitarian island country called "W", patterned partly on life in a concentration camp; and the second, descriptions of childhood. Both merge towards the end when the common theme of the Holocaust is explained.
Perec was a heavy smoker throughout his life, and was diagnosed with lung cancer in 1981. He died the following year in Ivry-sur-Seine at only forty-five-years old. His ashes are held at the columbarium of the Père Lachaise Cemetery.
David Bellos wrote an extensive biography of Perec: Georges Perec: A Life in Words, which won the Académie Goncourt's bourse for biography in 1994.
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Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
March 8, 2026
Geoges Perec bir deha, şeytana pabucunu ters giydirecek bir keskin zekası var, buna bir de kuvvetli kalemini ekleyince ortaya çok keyifli eserler çıkıyor. “Hayat Kullanma Kılavuzu”, “Harikalar Odası” gibi.
Bu kısa kitabında da Perec akademik yazılarla ilgili harika bir parodi sunuyor. Perec’in, kitabın tamamında sürdürmeyi başardığı iş, şaşırtıcı bir doğrulukla akademik yayın örnekleri vermiş olması. İlk örnek, ki kitaba adını veren makale (çakma makale), tıp camiasında olan herkesi inandıracak bir format ve içeriğe sahip. Perec yerine akademik ünvanlı birkaç isim yazın kimse de bu makaleye bilimsel değil demez. Giriş, materyal metod, tartışma ve sonuç, bir de kaynaklar verilmiş sonunda, daha ne olsun ki ? Kaynaklar arasında dönemin Fransa başkanı Giscard d’Estaing varmış ne gam... Benzer bir çalışma bu kez gerçekten bilimsel ortamda 1996'daki Sokal Olayı olarak gerçekleşmiştir. Prof Alan Sokal prestijli bir yayını olan Social Text dergisine "Aşılan Sınırlar: Kuantum Kütleçekiminin Dönüşümsel Bir Betimlemesine Doğru" başlıklı postmodern jargonu ve düşünceleri kullanan ve önde gelen postmodern düşünürlere gönderme yapan ama aslında tamamen uydurma, bilimsel bakımdan geçersiz olan bir makale yolladı. Dergi makalenin sahteliğinden hiç kuşkulanmadan, makaleyi olduğu gibi yayınladı.
Diğer sözde bilimsel çalışmaları da olması gerektiği gibi “akademik komik yazılar” denemeyecek ciddiyette yazılmış. Perec neden böyle yazıyor acaba, bıçak gibi ince ve keskin zekasını yansıtmak için mi, ya da mensubu olduğu Oulipo grubunun çıtasını daha da yüksetmek için mi bilemem. Ayrıca bu metni yazdığı yılları göz önüne aldığımızda internet ve arama motorlarını kullanmadan bu kadar bilgiye hem de doğru bilgiye nasıl ulaştığını düşünmek Perec’e olan saygı ve hayranlığımı bir kat daha arttırdı.
Bu kitabı ya çok keyifle gülerek ve hayranlıkla okuyacaksınız ya da çok absürd bulup ne biçim bir şey diyerek kenara koyacaksınız, inanın ikisi arasında olabilecek bir okuma çok zor. Bu nedenle okuma listenizde yer alması konusunda ısrarım yok.
Bu kısa kitabında da Perec akademik yazılarla ilgili harika bir parodi sunuyor. Perec’in, kitabın tamamında sürdürmeyi başardığı iş, şaşırtıcı bir doğrulukla akademik yayın örnekleri vermiş olması. İlk örnek, ki kitaba adını veren makale (çakma makale), tıp camiasında olan herkesi inandıracak bir format ve içeriğe sahip. Perec yerine akademik ünvanlı birkaç isim yazın kimse de bu makaleye bilimsel değil demez. Giriş, materyal metod, tartışma ve sonuç, bir de kaynaklar verilmiş sonunda, daha ne olsun ki ? Kaynaklar arasında dönemin Fransa başkanı Giscard d’Estaing varmış ne gam... Benzer bir çalışma bu kez gerçekten bilimsel ortamda 1996'daki Sokal Olayı olarak gerçekleşmiştir. Prof Alan Sokal prestijli bir yayını olan Social Text dergisine "Aşılan Sınırlar: Kuantum Kütleçekiminin Dönüşümsel Bir Betimlemesine Doğru" başlıklı postmodern jargonu ve düşünceleri kullanan ve önde gelen postmodern düşünürlere gönderme yapan ama aslında tamamen uydurma, bilimsel bakımdan geçersiz olan bir makale yolladı. Dergi makalenin sahteliğinden hiç kuşkulanmadan, makaleyi olduğu gibi yayınladı.
Diğer sözde bilimsel çalışmaları da olması gerektiği gibi “akademik komik yazılar” denemeyecek ciddiyette yazılmış. Perec neden böyle yazıyor acaba, bıçak gibi ince ve keskin zekasını yansıtmak için mi, ya da mensubu olduğu Oulipo grubunun çıtasını daha da yüksetmek için mi bilemem. Ayrıca bu metni yazdığı yılları göz önüne aldığımızda internet ve arama motorlarını kullanmadan bu kadar bilgiye hem de doğru bilgiye nasıl ulaştığını düşünmek Perec’e olan saygı ve hayranlığımı bir kat daha arttırdı.
Bu kitabı ya çok keyifle gülerek ve hayranlıkla okuyacaksınız ya da çok absürd bulup ne biçim bir şey diyerek kenara koyacaksınız, inanın ikisi arasında olabilecek bir okuma çok zor. Bu nedenle okuma listenizde yer alması konusunda ısrarım yok.
August 9, 2010
An absolutely fantastic spoof on academic writing (its uniform, uniforming and self-uniforming style, its rigid format, its solemn codes, its anal retentive provision against plagiarism, its ghostly but also ghastly boundaries, its constipation, its repression, its common sense —which of course always comes across as madness, pure and simple, its pathetic peer review neurosis and its unadulterated mediocrity). Perec reproduces all of that with astonishing accuracy in a very intense parodic key that he manages to sustain for the entirety of the book. He is all out to get academia, as we should all be. Of course being him and Oulipo (of which I'd never read a thing until this book, but I did know a bit about the crazy things they were up to, that gang of clever, clever people), being him and Oulipo: he takes the parody beyond itself. The book isn't written with the sole purpose of turning everything despicable about academic writing into an object of unashamed mockery, but it is also, simultaneously, a way of telling extremely moving stories. Each of those formally constipated and, for that reason, extremely hilarious academic papers, is a profoundly beautiful story in disguise, so you have both parody of the kind that will make you laugh out loud in public places, and food for the imagination, for thought, like you find in you when you read Romeo and Juliet or, more accurately, Romeo and Giulio, and not in Verona but in Venice (here I'm referring specifically to the last "scientific paper" in the compilation, "Roussel and Venice: Outline of a Melancholy Geography." But the whole book is absolutely wonderful.
October 27, 2008
Mostly for only the die-hard fan. More engaging than the rest, however, is the last and longest piece, a collaboration with Harry Mathews, "Roussel and Venice."
December 6, 2020
einstein, zırvastein, dreistein, et al.
January 4, 2018
Quite, quite mad. There is something about Perec (and very few other writers and artists) that is in common with magicians and serial killers: that they go to enormous and unfeasible lengths to achieve highly specific aims.
December 30, 2011
good idea. but boring.
August 7, 2016
Zweistein, Dreistein diye kaynakça mı olur lan. Deli bu Perec.
November 16, 2020
Esercizi di stile, portati avanti fino in fondo, divertenti ma tutto sommato sterili
August 8, 2025
Lu en version originale, ce recueil regroupe des articles scientifiques... ou presque, dûs à la plume facétieuse de Georges Perec. Pas d'esprit de sérieux ici : le premier, qui donne son titre au recueil, fait mine d'étudier la corrélation chez les cantatrices entre le cri et la réception d'une tomate en pleine poire (et de vérifier si ça marche aussi avec les trognons de chou, les balles de fusil ou le ketchup). Écrit dans l'anglais raide et standardisé des revues universitaires, parsemé de références bibliographiques farcies de calembours, il élève la potacherie au rang des Beaux-Arts. À l'autre extrémité une longue rêverie sur les sources autobiographiques de l'oeuvre de Raymond Roussel, coécrite avec Harry Matthews, est empreinte d'une mélancolie toute vénitienne sans cesser de taquiner la psychocritique de l'époque. On dirait un hommage borgesien à Roussel voire un hommage rousselien à Borges. Tantôt loufoques, tantôt pince-sans-rire, ces textes sont dignes de l'immortelle et contemporaine Cacopédie tout en rappelant que chez Perec la facétie est souvent le masque de l'émotion, ici exemplairement l'admiration et l'amitié.
June 14, 2022
3 stelle solo perché non è di facile lettura, anzi, è più semplice perdersi nei meandri dei racconti di Perec. Nonostante ciò, senza dubbio questa è un’opera geniale, sia come idea che come realizzazione. Se volete leggere un libro strambò, scegliete questo.
October 30, 2023
So very well written that at some point you'd think that these are actual scientific papers. Are they ? Are they not? If you've been to french university, this is literally how they talk and it doesn't always make sense..
October 16, 2018
Zéér. Inspirerende. Lectuur.
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June 11, 2021Güvercinlerin yürüdüğü bu dam
Kaleler arasında titrer mezar taşları arasında
Adil güney orada ateşler yakar
Buğdaylar buğdaylar hep yeniden başlarlar
Kaleler arasında titrer mezar taşları arasında
Adil güney orada ateşler yakar
Buğdaylar buğdaylar hep yeniden başlarlar
April 18, 2025
Perec avrebbe adorato i papers firmati dal prof. Stronzo Bestiale
January 5, 2026
Eğlenceli bir kitap, çevirisi de başarılı bence.
November 25, 2014
Hilarious. I thought that the piece on Roussel was tiring in a particularly oulipian way (cf. "Winter Journey", Rouboud's "The Loop", parts of Italo Calvino's "If on a Winter's Night a Traveler", or the stories made by a high school student trying to write like Borges), but the rest of the book is fantastic. Good to reread.
June 15, 2010
Du grand Perec. Très drôle mais pas que. Il faudrait aller chercher les citations cachées et autres clins d'oeil. L'analyse du texte fictif de Raymond Roussel est un monument et donne envie d'aller voir ce que le bonhomme a réllement écrit.
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews